Top Gun School for Your Managers? Why Not?

A few years ago, when working with two different chains of retail stores, I was studying the traits of excellent store managers. One characteristic common among the best store managers was that they all knew exactly how well their store was operating at any given moment. They knew what their sales for the current week or month were and how well they measured up against expectations. They knew if all their equipment was operating correctly. They knew how well every employee was performing. In short, they knew the current status of all their store's vital signs.

I started looking for a way to capture this for management development training. I found it in the sky. When a fighter pilot in a dogfight knows where he is relative to his enemy at all times, he has a greater chance of survival, and possibly the necessary edge to shoot down his adversary. Pilots with this dynamic knowledge came to be known as having superior situational awareness.

Flight instructors soon adopted the idea for general aviation. They began training pilots in techniques to stay aware of all the information needed to take off, fly, and land a plane safely. The technique is to regularly scan the instrument panel cockpit as well as the sky and land below. When used systematically, these techniques greatly improved a pilot's ability to follow a flight plan and ensure his own safety as well as the safety of others in the air.

I then adapted the idea of situational awareness to training retail store managers. To be successful, a manager must make decisions and judgments every day. The best decisions are based on having trustworthy information about the business and a command of what that information means in the context of the business. I took this idea and developed ways to train managers to make good decisions by making sure they had all the right information and that they knew what that information meant to their operation.

Three keys to making situational awareness work for a manager

• You have to know where to look for the information you need to know how well your operation is running. I call these the cues and gauges of the business.
• You have to collect this information systematically. I call this the scan pattern, after the way pilots scan their instrument panels in a set pattern every time. This ensures that you get all the information you need without missing anything.
• You must scan your cues and gauges regularly. This is the discipline of applying the skill. When a pilot is landing a plane, he might check his altimeter and air speed indicators every few seconds and look at the runway through the windshield just as often. In a business, you must scan with the same kind of discipline and frequency. It's not enough to check on your results every few days. You must check for your cues and gauges as often as they change. That may mean hourly, daily, or even every few minutes. Things change. Business is dynamic. You want to fly straight to your business goals, not crash and burn from not paying attention to vital information.

In a high-speed dogfight, situational awareness can mean the difference between life and death. In business, it will lead to better decisions and faster reactions to changing situations. Managers who make better decisions and who react quickly in a dynamic business usually perform at outstanding levels.

When managers were well trained to maintain their situational awareness, we've seen some reduce lost sales by paying closer attention to customer waiting times. In another case, we saw a large reduction in comebacks, or vehicles that were returned to a service facility to have a repair done over. These are costly for many reasons, and reducing them by a third saved one client tremendous sums and greatly increased annual profits.

Look around you. If you have managers working for you, how good is their situational awareness? Can they tell you off the top of their head where they stand right now on their key performance goals? Do they spot problems as they begin to happen rather than after damage is done? How about yourself? Is this a skill you have and use, or could you stand to improve?

You don't have to be a store manager to make situational awareness pay off for you. If you're an individual contributor, stay on top of the status of all your projects. Check constantly for looming deadline conflicts that might cause problems. Monitor your progress, and if you waver from your plan, make changes to stay on track. With constant awareness of the cues and gauges in your dynamic work life, you might just have a terrific year.

If you're a corporate manager, then your timeframes may not be as short-term as a retail managers but the principles still apply. The more you're aware of what's happening in your department or company and what these happenings mean to your overall performance, the better you'll do at making decisions and mid-course corrections.

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